Archive for the ‘Facebook PPC’ Category

Giving Away A Facebook Campaign

Facebook CPC vs. Facebook CPM

One of the great stumbling blocks for newbie Facebook advertisers continues to be the knee-jerk reaction to bid CPC, CPC and only CPC. I’ll get briefly technical for those who don’t understand the terminology. It’s gonna be pretty centric to this post.

CPC is cost-per-click. You’re paying for every click that Facebook sends your way. It’s advantageous in that you’re never going to blow your budget on zero clicks. If you raise your bid high enough, you’re going to walk away with some test data even if you don’t profit. Unless of course you’re an absolute clustertard who doesn’t know how to get Facebook users to click on banners and eats impressions like they’re going out of fashion.

CPM is cost-per-mille. You’re bidding $X.XX for every 1000 impressions. If you don’t know what impressions are, seriously, give up and go home. The great advantage of CPM bidding is that, in theory, a good CTR (clickthrough rate) will see you paying a fraction of the cost for a click as you would with CPC bidding. This is because Facebook likes guaranteed money in the bank. For every 1000 page views on Facebook, your shit is being shown at the expense of another ad. If Facebook is getting paid to show it, regardless of the clicks, they couldn’t honestly care less whether your CTR is a 0.05 or a 0.15. But rest assured, YOU will care when a low CTR burns a hole in your pocket.

The overwhelming majority of new affiliates are so bat shit scared of their own ineptitude that the idea of bidding CPM is like jumping off a cliff in to a sea of fail. They will bid CPC because they like to be in control of their expenses. It’s much easier to calculate the metrics of what you need to do to be profitable if you’re working with a fixed CPC.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I would have ever made it as a Facebook affiliate if I’d only ever stuck to the CPC model. Practically every campaign I create, my intention is always the same – raise the god damn CTR and undercut Facebook’s tendency to bloat the price of a click to ridiculous proportians. That means getting on to CPM and producing a stellar creative that gets the users clicking.

I’m not going to dismiss CPC bidding strategies off the cuff. There’s a time and a place for them. But I am going to preach the importance of understanding how both of these strategies work – and how they can affect the performance of your campaigns.

Bidding with CPC

Not so long ago, it was possible for affiliates to bid CPC and rack up a ton of cheap clicks for as little as a few cents each. With traffic that converted and the volume that the world’s largest social networking site offered – it made a lot of affiliates very rich in a very short space of time. Unfortunately, an increase in advertising competition and a tighter ruling of what Facebook will allow hasn’t so much changed the game – it’s a started a new one.

You can still find cheap clicks in some markets. But if you’re thinking of hitting the United States with a sweeping demographic, you can expect the marketing challenge of a lifetime. Those cheap clicks are no more. You can either bid for the kids, or take your ass international and start hiring translators to tap in to markets that haven’t yet folded in on themselves. CPC bidding is still important though.

Calculated Testing with CPC

If you’re launching a new campaign and you have no educated idea of how the offer should be converting, it’s natural to want to get clicks through in a way that doesn’t burn your wallet. Likewise, if you know that the payout is $15, you can set your maximum CPC at $0.50 and know that as long as 1 in 30 of those clicks converts, you’re breaking even. The metrics are simple.

I like to run these initial CPC tests to gauge the conversion rate for my selected demographic on Facebook. Search PPC is not a good marker. The conversion rate will vary dramatically between traffic sources – especially if you’re direct linking.

If I found, for example, that I was breaking even with the 1/30 conversion rate – my attention would immediately turn to calculating what kind of CTR I would need to take the campaign on to CPM and lift my margins.

So with an EPC of $0.50, and my own personal preference being at least a 100% ROI, I would need to be paying no more than $0.25 per click. That then becomes my marker for a successful CPM campaign. If I can move to CPM and bid $0.25, I know that I need to be producing a CTR of 0.1 to be getting my 100% ROI.

It just so happens that a “suggested bid” CPC of $0.50 will usually translate to about $0.30 if you flick the CPM switch. This is why I generally suggest that you need to be hitting at least 0.1% with your CTRs to have much in the way of flexibility.

No Guarantee of Results with CPC

Everything I said above about calculated testing and CPC? Yeah, it doesn’t mean shit if your CTR stoops too low. I’ll say it again. Facebook likes money in the bank. If they give your ad 10,000 impressions and not a single user clicks – why would they continue to show it? Assuming there’s a CPM affiliate willing to pay $X.XX for the impressions whether anybody clicks or not?

So essentially, your CTR is still important. Bidding CPC to get a feel for your margins is all well and good, but you need to deliver a good creative. Or you’ll spend the rest of your life submitting ads to interns that take 6 days to get approved and run for about 7 minutes.

The way to conquer this common stumbling block is to leave absolutely no stone unturned with your split testing. Submit at least 10 ad variations, all significantly different, and this should be enough to force a decent ammount of impressions – and clicks – from Facebook to carve out some test data. No matter how retarded you are with your creatives, the law of numbers says that so much shit being thrown is going to leave something sticking on the wall.

What Scares Affiliates About CPM?

It took a little convincing for me to wade in to CPM advertising. I remember my fear being that an unsuccessful CPC campaign would waste my time – but rarely rinse my budget. An unsuccessful CPM campaign, however, would lose me money fast. I was worried that I’d spend money and nobody would even click my ad. Too many factors, too much weight on the creative…too much to worry about.

Are you serious about marketing though? The reality is that the large majority of networks and advertising agencies will require a CPM based media buy before they work with you – simply because it qualifies the affiliate. Why should they care that their traffic doesn’t back out for you? CPC is a gamble on their inventory, and I’m afraid to say, it’s nearly always the affiliate who’s left to roll the dice.

Facebook is probably the friendliest environment to get your feet wet with CPM. It’s self serve, which means that you can easily go in and switch off the campaigns that are leaking a loss. Remember this before you shit bricks when somebody tells you to break from your CPC patterns. Most affiliates are forced to adapt to CPM eventually, and they’re all the more diversified when they do.

CPM Bidding Delivers Value To Good Advertisers

Most people who fail through CPM bidding are victims of their own laziness and bad work. Cheap clicks for all are a thing of the past, but CPM makes it possible to cut the costs of your clicks quite dramatically. Remember that if you become chained to CPC bidding, you will always be restricted by the artificial ceiling of what Facebook decides to charge for that click.

If you take the CPM route, you’re still going to be somewhat exposed to Facebook’s charging variations – but a good CTR will ultimately decide the fate of your campaign. You can undercut Facebook’s valuation of a click and score cheap traffic by producing targeted advertisements. Good work from good affiliates will produce profit. That’s the difference maker.

Bidding CPM is the only way I’ve come close to replicating the cheap traffic that existed during the first months of Facebook Ads. Target your markets like a laser and there’s still big money to be made.

The Biggest Problem With CPM Bidding

And this is a big fucking problem, let me tell you. Facebook is inept when it comes to allowing the advertiser to implement day parting. That’s the ability to have your ad displayed only during specific intervals in the day.

There are tools and scripts to implement manual day-parting, and that’s the only reason I still use Facebook Ads because day parting is absolutely critical for any CPM campaign.

I’m not going to expose specific market trends, but needless to say, some offers convert a lot better and draw a lot more clicks during the night. If you’re bidding CPM, your exposure to slow periods in the day are that much more damaging. If you’re running CPC, you at least have the safety net of only paying for clicks. For some of my campaigns, however, the only way to stay profitable is to manually pause them during the hours that I’ve analyzed to be impression burners.

You want your traffic primed. CPM plus a lack of day parting is an ugly spanner in the works.

My word count is exploding so I’ve clearly gone off-track somewhere. This is a brief, but not too brief, look at the challenges of CPM and CPC. Hit me up with any questions. I’ve got a backlog of emails to reply to which were on this subject so I thought I’d summarize in to one ugly post. Will reply individually when I’m less busy playing with my balls.

Laser Targeting Small Markets On Facebook

There are a number of ways to skin the cat on Facebook.

As tempting as bribing an intern can be – after the 91st rejected ad notification – you should keep faith that eventually some stupid son of a bitch is going to risk detention and hit the big red “approve” button. As an entire office of Under 22 whores Zuckerberg would love to shag gasp with horror, it’s possible to make some pretty good bank. That’s if you’re willing to persevere. Facebook is a love hate relationship for many. But when I love you, Facebook, I really fucking love you.

The thing that really gets on my tits about Facebook is the effect it has on my working day. I’ll plow through a giant list of dating ads, only to have to do it all again at 10pm when an intern decides my hussy is showing too much skin. I mean, seriously, do yourself a favour, Facebook. Wake up and smell the bacon. Guys are more likely to click on a chick who’s making no effort to keep her modesty outside of the 110×80.

For those of you following my Twitter, you’ll have heard my CTR-raising trick. It’s basically to find girls sucking lollipops. This seems to draw immediate attention and bag the clicks. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because more guys are interested in blowjobs than dating.

I feel myself drifting off with another aimless tangent, so I’ll cut to the chase. The most success I’ve had making money on Facebook has been by laser targeting very small markets. To do this, you’re going to need a greater investment of time – and probably patience – considering you’re going to be submitting many more ads.

To take dating for an example, I know there are a lot of affiliates who direct link and manage to stay profitable. If that’s working for you, great. I don’t think I’ve ever direct linked on a dating campaign and gotten the margins of profit that would make it worthwhile for me to keep running. Instead I prefer a little market segmentation.

If you’re running dating ads, you should probably be using the CPM system. Paying by the click is notoriously expensive for this vertical and your ability to have success will pretty much hinge on what CTR you can muster. I drop any ads that aren’t getting at least 0.09% as a general CTR rule. Not only do I drop the ads, but I also banish the girls from my hard drive forevermore. You can forget HotorNot.com. The real beauty contest is whether I can use your face to get a bunch of 25 year old American guys to sign up for some lonely hearts piss-parade. Anything less than 0.1% CTR and I’m sorry girl, but it’s over.

The best way to raise a CTR with dating ads, from my experience, is to drill down and target by the city or state. I like to change my ad texts to something that is relevant and local. Better yet, I like to make it sound like the target is the hot commodity. Check this shit out but don’t go copy and pasting it or I will track you down and break your fucking balls.

You can probably change the colour of the lollipop and do some pretty advanced split testing. Maybe even the tint the lipstick. I’ll leave it to you. What I’m trying to say here is that you’re sending a message to the single guys in London that they’re wanted.

The next part of the puzzle is to build a landing page that delivers on the geographical promise. If you haven’t tracked down a PHP script for geo-targeting the user’s current location, you’re about 5 years behind the porn industry and you should probably get up to scratch right about now.

I was stumbling across a porn site the other day (research purposes fyi), and I noticed the targeting had advanced to such an extent that it was almost asking me if I’d like to fuck my nextdoor neighbour. The porn industry has been geo-targeting for so long now and it’s taken the rest of the marketplace a good couple of years to catch up. If you’re ever sitting there looking for some inspiration, looking to take your creatives to the next level…I shit you not. Go and find some porn. You’ll see marketing tactics employed that are a few light years ahead of the rest of us. Why? Because the competition encourages innovation.

Well, as far as geolocating goes, I like to jack that particular innovation and shove it straight in to my dating landing pages. If you can get the average simpleton Joe thinking that there’s a shag around the nearest block, he’s gonna be salivating all the way to that shiny Mate 1 confirmation email.

I have a custom built CMS that makes it possible for me to add a couple of location specific images, change my region settings, and spit out a fully functional landing page for any dating market in the world. This works like a wet dream for setting up new Facebook campaigns. The only problem, as you can probably imagine, is getting the intern to play ball and approve the damn thing.

The real challenge with any small-scale Facebook campaign is something that a surprising number of affiliates fail to understand: retaining your CTR.

See, not only do you have to worry about getting an initial CTR of above 0.09%, you also have to keep it stable. Many affiliates watch with confusion as their super targeted campaign starts with a surge of success – only to fade to shit by the weekend. Well, you need to conquer the banner blindness syndrome.

If you’re targeting a group size containing less than 100,000 Facebook users, you really need to be actively switching out your banners and testing new ad texts.

It doesn’t take long to rack up 100,000 impressions. Let’s say by some statistical miracle occurrence those 100,000 impressions are distributed evenly with 1 impression per user. After every user has seen the ad and decided not to click on it, you’re going to have great difficulty changing their mind when it next pops up on their screen. Banner blindness kicks in surprisingly quickly. Users begin to ignore your best worded ad texts. Your CTR fades day-by-day until your profit margins are bust or your volume of clicks is a trickle.

To beat the banner blindness, you need to create many different ad variations and KEEP THEM RUNNING. Even when one ad significantly outperforms it. I’ve felt the temptation, believe me. You see one ad raking in a CTR almost double that of another, and you remove it – what happens? The CTR of the best performing ad will invariably drop.

A lot of the time this is because the top performing ad starts to receive all of the impressions. Banner blindness quickly sets in. There’s no alternate text or image to keep the message fresh and shit begins to go wrong.

Some small scale campaigns are destined to never make it beyond a short lifespan. This is reality. You can’t milk a cow forever. But if you want to get the most out of an ultra targeted campaign, you really need to be mixing up your creatives and keeping your message fresh in the user’s mind.

One of the best examples I’ve seen on Facebook is the current campaign for Mafia Wars. I’m not going to out any creatives, but every time I refresh the page, it seems like they’ve changed the ad text or the image or something else to drag my eye back to their message. Take note and remember not to let your own profitable campaigns slip away through neglect. Keep it fresh and you’ll keep on banking.

EDIT: Just last week, this blog was voted in as one of the newest additions to the 9rules network. 9rules is a highly respected members-only community for the best content from the independent web. Naturally, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing there. But thanks for reading.

The Shit I’ve Learnt Not To Do On Facebook

One of the first blogs I read before moving in to affiliate marketing was a Facebook piece over on Nicky Cakes. It explained how and why I was such a retard for failing to make money with Facebook.

I realize now, about two years too late, that Facebook Advertising was the genuine shit back in the day. Right before the guidelines started warping in to something resembling an affiliate hate list. You could put in a half day’s work and see an enormous mountain of cheap clicks. Clicks that produced conversions. One thing Facebook hasn’t lost over time is the quality of it’s traffic.

It’s a shame we can’t go back to 2007 and jump on the gravy train as if we’d seen it coming. I’d have jumped on some acai berries while I was there. But the reality? It’s 2009 and advertising on Facebook requires some actual marketing knowledge. You can go and read over Nicky Cakes’ Facebook tutorials, but as relevant as they may have been at the time, this industry swallows up profitable tactics fast.

Anyway, if you want expert advice on how to get rich using Facebook – don’t be looking at me. It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve managed to troubleshoot my way out of the red and get some profitable campaigns on the burn. I’m currently in the process of scaling my campaigns and I’m quite happy to see them doubling my money.

But having thrown a festival sized tank of shit at the wall in the hope that a marketing strategy would stick, I can hopefully offer some advice for what NOT to do. This could be a long one.

Don’t advertise on Facebook with the Google mindset.

I don’t think enough people talk about the difference between marketing on various search engines, let alone the change in dynamics that comes with marketing on a social media site.

I was traditionally a search guy for a long time. All of my income came from search based PPC. When I decided to shift a campaign across to Facebook for the first time, it tanked embarrassingly.

This is how it goes for most people, whether they’ve got the modesty to admit it or not. Makes sense when you think about it, though. It’s much easier to reach the right demographic of people on Google. Christ, you’re bidding on keywords that consumers are actually hammering in to their browsers. If you can’t find the right audience there, well, maybe you need to go back to the drawing board.

Facebook is entirely different. You’re not bidding on keywords that people are actively searching for – rather you’re serving your ad to a certain demographic and hoping that they bite the bullet. Vague targeting is punished with a high CPC and impressions that have dried up by dawn.

My first mistake was in spreading the net too wide and advertising to as many users as I could filter in to my campaign. This, obviously, ended in tears and a very low clickthrough rate.

Sample size: 800,000
CTR: 0.05
Impressions: Not many without breaking the bank.

If you’re using Google, you get in to the mindset of trying to reach as many people as possible with your relevant keywords. Perfectly fine on Adwords. But if you try to target everybody who *might* match your demographic on Facebook, you’re going to collect a lot of wasted impressions.

I only started achieving success on Facebook when I reduced my ad target sizes to under 50,000. I’ve managed to scale upwards, but even now, I don’t like advertising to groups larger than 100,000. You need close control over the keywords that your profiles are matched to.

Do your research before you start bombarding the damn interns. Head on over to Microsoft Adlabs and put the tools to use. The Demographic Prediction tool is excellent for laying down the first building blocks of any well targeted Facebook campaign.

Enter the URL of the offer landing page (at the advertiser end, not your own), and you’ll be presented some nice starting points for targeting your campaign.

This gives you a rough idea of the demographics that are already visiting the advertiser’s site. Never a good idea to judge success on patterns as flimsy as this but we’ll take it as a starting point.

One of the areas where I see a lot of marketers failing is in taking the bigger percentage. Acai berries as a prime example. How long did it take for some of you to catch on that it wasn’t just women who were searching for acai? I’d be seeing landing pages everywhere with twenty something chicks showing off their new flat stomachs. How many of those banners featured guys? This despite the acai market having a 30/70 guys to girls split according to some networks. You might run with the 70 percent, but the 30 percent is pretty fucking significant when you’re talking about a billion dollar booming industry.

With Facebook, in particular, it’s possible to find a niche within a niche just by targeting the smaller crowd of users that everybody else ignores. A bit like Canada. Why oh why did I spend 4 months scratching around with doomed USA-based Facebook campaigns when I don’t need 13 million fucking conversions to get rich?

Anyway, moral of the story. Get to know your target market. I mean, really well. Take whatever keywords you can relate to your product and plug them in to the filtering system. This leads on to probably my most expensive mistake.

Your message has to be consistent on Facebook.

All pieces of the jigsaw have to come together. You can quite easily drive traffic to your site with a headline like “These Acai Berries Are Free”. But if your landing page headline says “Well, actually they’re not. But now that you’re here…”

This is expensive because it’ll get you a lot of clicks but a distinct lack of conversions in the column that matters. Whatever advert you place on Facebook, you have to realize that people clicking it are CHANCE clickers. They didn’t search for your shit. You threw it in their face with a headline that caught their attention. You’ve gotta make your landing page instantly sell whatever x factor it was that brought your average Facebook junkie to the party in the first place.

Facebook traffic does convert. We all know that it converts because people have built a living and a future on this one single damn platform. But you have to keep your message consistent.

Specific keywords used to filter users.
Ad title.
Ad image.
Landing page content.
Final offer page content.

They all need to have something in common, or you better know your demographic like it’s your best friend.

Facebook is all about trial and error. You’ve probably heard this so many times that it’s lost it’s meaning. And no, it might not be as easy to make instaprofit as it was a couple of years back. But the industry moves on and we all roll with it.

I’ve established some successful campaigns on Facebook over the last few months that have kinda made me reconsider the most profitable ways of marketing online. I might add a few posts of useful tips I’ve picked up along the way. I might not. Just remember that it only takes one successful Facebook campaign to pay for the dollars you’ve lost on the shit that never worked out.